Poetry on Saturday

All of the musical imperatives of tonal control, technical skill, the feeling of energy and power under restraint, were very useful when applied to the making of a poem. Musical control, translated into the realm of writing poetry, means not squeezing the emotional content out of each word, but letting the phrase carry itself. You have to let go of that all-too-familiar feeling â€œLook, Ma, Iâ€™m singing,â€ and hold back every obvious word, gesture, or phrase. This means trusting your own skill, your own control, and, above all, trusting in the poem itself….